St Luke’s, Havelock North – OT 33, Stewardship 3 2008
– Three Principles of Christian Stewardship
“Well done you good and faithful servant.”
Clarence Jordan, New Testament scholar and co-founder
of Habitat for Humanity, once described Christ’s parables as a Trojan Horse –
they seem harmless enough, so you let ‘em in and bam! they’ve got you. I think
he was probably right, but the “let ‘em in” part is crucial.
Today we come to the third and final of our
stewardship Sundays for the year and I promise you that I did not choose the
gospel to match the theme, and nor did we time the stewardship campaign to
conclude on this parable, sometimes things just come together.
Actually, if I had been choosing a gospel
reading especially for today there’s a good chance I would have deliberately
avoided this parable of the talents, not because it isn’t appropriate but in a
way because it’s to appropriate, to the point that if we really take what it
says seriously we might find ourselves carried several very large strides
beyond where we’re comfortable in going, but then who said Christian
stewardship was meant to be comfortable?
And that’s what we’re talking about – Christian
stewardship. One of the issues I have with so much that’s been said and written
about stewardship over recent decades is that it really isn’t all that
Christian, and we shouldn’t be surprised about that. We start talking about
money and resources and immediately people look to businessmen and women,
people who work with money for a living, people with backgrounds in fundraising
and marketing, because after all if we want people to give us more money, or
give us some other stuff, surely the people who can help us do that are those
who specialise in this kind of work?
Well, that would be fine if all we were talking
about was raising money and if the values of business matched the values of the
Gospel but we’re not and most often they don’t. That, I believe, is one of the
reasons why a number of commentators have argued strongly that this parable
we’ve heard today isn’t about stewardship at all – it’s not about tithing or
giving your time, it’s not even really about money or resources, so it can’t be
about stewardship, and they’re right, it’s not.
Let’s be very clear here; when Jesus told this
parable of the talents he wasn’t thinking about stewardship campaigns. This
wasn’t about teaching the disciples the value of tithing or encouraging more
money out of his followers. What this parable represents is just one part of a
much wider conversation which includes last week’s story of the foolish
bridesmaids and, most importantly, next week’s prophecy of the sheep and the
goats which concludes with those famous and essential words, ‘when you did it
for the least of these, you did it for me’. So it’s vital that we don’t read or
hear the Parable of the Talents in isolation because we can really only begin
to grasp what’s being said here when we look at it all as a whole. But even
then, when it comes right down to it, if we continue to hold on to this narrow,
business focused understanding of stewardship, even if we look at this whole
chapter of Matthew and beyond it’s not about stewardship, unless, as I believe
we must, we radically change our understanding of what stewardship is.
This is, as I said, our third week on
stewardship and I could so easily do another three weeks, but don’t panic
because I won’t. What I do want to do though is wind up this campaign with a
look at what I believe Christian stewardship is all about, and I want to do
that through today’s Gospel reading with an exploration of three principles of
Christian stewardship.
“For it is as if a man,
going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them”.
Right
here, in the very first verse of today’s reading, right at the start of this
famous parable is the first and foremost principle of Christian stewardship and
why it is that the word ‘Christian’ is paramount here.
So
much of what I hear and read is about asking us to give our money to God, or our
time, or our resources. This is especially true for most of us who have been
born and raised in a white, Euro-centric society and culture. I once shared a
pastoral class with a man from
Matthew
really takes this parable of the talents and supersizes it. While Luke has the
three servants receiving a few mina, or ten pounds as the NRSV translates it,
Matthew has five talents. A talent was a huge sum of money, around twenty years
worth of the average wage, so five talents was just unimaginable. We’re talking
millions of today’s dollars entrusted to the servant’s care, but note, never
actually made theirs.
“You ought to have invested
my money … and on my return I would have received what was my own”.
We’ve
all heard discussions about how much it’s appropriate to give to the church –
10% gross or net – but I believe this first principle of Christian stewardship
challenges the attitudes behind those conversations. The question isn’t so much
‘how much should I give to God’ as ‘how much is God’s in the first place?’ and
the challenge of this parable is that the answer is, the lot. It’s not ours to
start with so it all belongs to God, that’s the first principle of Christian
stewardship.
“The
one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded with them,
and made five more talents.”
I
have a sneaking suspicion that there are elements of this parable that have a
whole new layer of meaning in a time of financial crisis. Here we have three
servants, each entrusted with a huge amount of money by their master, one goes
a buries it, a common and quite prudent method of protecting ones money in
first century Palestine, the others go out and trade with the money and make a
profit. Who does the master approve of?
I
think we need to be careful here that we don’t draw allusions where there are
none or push a point too far. Yes, the first two servants take risks with their
master’s money, and I can’t help but wonder how the story would have gone if
those risks hadn’t worked out. But taking risks and being foolish isn’t
necessarily the same thing. Take those US banks and kiwi lending companies for
example that having got caught up in the whole high risk/high profit sub-prime
mortgage scene, and all that followed on from it, were ultimately risking other
people’s money on risks that were almost guarantied not to pay off, somehow I
don’t think those are people whom anyone would call good and faithful servants.
But the point remains, principle number two; progress is almost always more
important than protection.
I’m
often involved in conversations about what’s best for the church’s resources.
Someone wants money for this, or there’s an idea for a ministry focused on that,
and all of them have some pros and cons about them. Some of them seem like safe
bets or maybe they’re cheap or perhaps they’re even both. Some of them look
completely insane and almost assured to cost a fortune with little to show for
it. Which are the ones we should invest in? The ones that will progress the
coming of God’s kingdom.
I
talked about this a couple of weeks ago and it’s a vital concept here – the
first priority for any Christian is to make God’s kingdom a reality. ‘Go and
tell them the
So
what does that actually mean? Well, many of you have seen a good example right
here when the parish was faced with the choice of keeping or demolishing the
old hall. I wasn’t here in those days, praise God! But from what I’ve heard and
seen and from what I experience working in this building on a daily basis, the
right decision was made, not just because it means I’ve got a comfortable
office and a toilet, but because it was the best decision for progressing the
mission of the church.
Where
protecting the past means impeding the progress of that mission, then our
choice becomes clearer, whether it’s should we demolish a hall, or give money
to a food bank or commit time and energy to some well intentioned talkfest, the
same principle applies: Progress is almost always more important than
protection.
“You have been trustworthy in a few things, I
will put you in charge of many things”.
There
are those who will tell you that the reward for serving God is heaven. Others
will tell you that for every dollar you give, God will return it ten-fold. Some
believe that Christianity works like compound interest, producing bigger
returns every year. I’m here to tell you they’re all wrong.
The third principle of
Christian stewardship is simply this; the reward for faithful service is more
service.
How
fair is that? How about if I said to you, ‘come and work for me, cleaning my
house, doing my ironing, and at the end of the day I’ll reward you by letting
you do the gardening too’? I can see you queuing to help. But the key here once
again is to not look at this through the eyes of an employment arrangement or
basic, commercial commonsense. That’s not what this is about. Our reward for
serving God is more opportunities to serve God because it is in serving God
that we “enter into the joy of [our] master.”
Serving
God is not drudgery or a burden. Serving God is a privilege because it is
through that service that we enter into God’s joy, and to understand that
fully, to really comprehend what that means, we need to remember that this passage
doesn’t end with the completion of this parable and next week’s reading is
crucial. But you’ll need to come back next week to hear more about that.
Number
one, it’s not ours, number two, progress is almost always more important than
protection, and number three, the reward for faithful service is more service.
Three principles of Christian stewardship as we conclude this stewardship
campaign, and three principles that if we take them seriously will suddenly go
from being somewhat intriguing if perhaps a little discomforting, to radically
changing the way we live and give. That’s the Trojan Horse this parable
represents, it’s up to each of us whether we let it in.